


Sock Horses Make Poor Logos

by imkerfuffled



Series: 62 Things The Avengers Are Not Allowed To Do [8]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Avengers (2012), Skippy's List, somehow has minor spoilers for aos s1 winter soldier and age of ultron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-14
Updated: 2015-11-14
Packaged: 2018-05-01 15:19:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5210756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>13. Clint is not allowed to lurk in the shadowy rafters spying on people, unless specifically instructed to do so for an official S.H.I.E.L.D. sanctioned mission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sock Horses Make Poor Logos

**Author's Note:**

> It's set prior to the first Avengers movie, since Coulson still has an office, but other than that I managed to include mini spoilers for not one, not two, but three other MCU things. Go figure. 
> 
> (They're pretty tiny spoilers, though. They're really more like references. Anyway...)
> 
> (Also there's an offhand reference to Kate and the Young Avengers, because this is me. What did you expect?)
> 
> Other than that, this was the result of too much coffee, too little sleep, and looking too closely at the SHIELD logo in this dumb game I had on my phone.

Clint’s reputation as a prankster was well known and well documented throughout SHIELD’s ranks. Everyone, from the highest leveled officers to the freshest academy graduates had heard stories of his escapades: once he replaced all the fake guns with those of the paintball variety on a training exercise; another time he dressed up as Cupid for Valentine’s Day and bombarded all the couples with felt tipped arrows Rumor had it, that ended when Agent Morse tied him to an interrogation table with one of his own cable arrows, though no one had ever been able to provide proof of that.

As one Agent Murphy told it, “Barton doesn’t take anything seriously. And if at any point he does, it probably means we’re all about to die.”

So when Clint’s first words in his mandatory yearly psych evaluation were, “Have you ever noticed how the new SHIELD logo looks a little like a sad sock horse?” the psychologist thought it no more significant than any other avoidance techniques that Clint had employed over the years. 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Fury regretted placing Agents Barton and Romanoff on a team together. They only enabled each other. Case in point: breakfast. Most of Clint’s crazier ideas saw their beginnings in the mess hall early in the morning, when a sleep deprived Clint (occasionally substituted by another agent sitting at the table with Strike Team Delta) would say something ridiculous in an offhand manner, and Natasha would jokingly add on to it, at which point Clint would say something along the lines of:

“No, but really, it looks like a sad sock horse.”

Sometimes, Fury considered cancelling breakfasts altogether.

“I mean the head, specifically,” Clint elaborated as he shoved a forkful of pancakes into his already full mouth, “And it’s just on some of the newer stuff, with that modern, geometrical aesthetic redesign thing.”

“Say that again, but swallow,” Natasha said, “I can’t tell if you’re speaking English.”

Clint chewed his pancakes for a second, swallowed hard, and nearly choked before repeating what he’d said. “You know, those homemade stick horses with the sock heads that kids use to play cowboy,” he continued, “If you sorta squint at the logo, it looks a bit like that.”

“I still don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” Natasha calmly placed a normal amount of pancakes in her mouth.

“Hobby horses, that’s what they’re called!” Clint snapped his fingers, “And the head just sort of flops there. No distinguishing features whatsoever. It’s just a lumpy sock, on a stick, that flops.”

Natasha nodded thoughtfully, still contemplating her pancake, “So you’re saying you’re unhappy it’s not more like the old logo, which actually looks like an eagle’s head?”

“Exactly!”

“And you’re protesting the underlying trend in society to adopt simpler, more generalized appearances at the cost of nuance and individuality.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth, Tasha.”

“Mm-hmm,” Natasha reached across Clint to grab the syrup bottle, “Cooper’s going through a horse phase, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.” 

* * *

 

One day later, Natasha downloaded Photoshop onto her SHIELD computer and gave the logo little googley eyes, a pouty frown, and a horse’s mane. She printed out two copies; one she taped over the logo on her laptop, and the other she snuck into the file room to place. To say Coulson was displeased to have to explain to Fury why Hawkeye’s paper file now had colorful additions to its eagle insignia was an understatement rivaled only by the phrase, “Hawkeye was slightly overjoyed to hear about said additions.”

Now that Natasha had latched onto the sad sock horse idea, Clint had no choice but to take the concept even further. He couldn’t let Natasha have the last word on the matter after all. So he printed out her photoshopped logo, cut around the head, and taped it to an old arrow that he’d bent by trying to use it as a dinner knife. He declared it the SHIELD hobby horse for tiny woodland fairies.

Natasha decided it needed wings, so they both took a late night trip to Walmart and bought a pair of pink, sparkly wings from the costume department to attach to the arrow shaft. Clint hung it up proudly on his locker and told the story of its creation to anyone who cared to listen, as well as most who did not.

When it appeared in Coulson’s office mere minutes before a top secret meeting with Fury in said office, Coulson decided he had crossed a line. Fury decided he would rather like to strangle Clint Barton, but for once he showed more restraint. 

* * *

 

“Barton,” Coulson called Clint into his office with a pinched smile. Clint often remarked that all of Coulson’s emotions could be expressed in smiles, and this one in particular was deeply familiar to Clint. He had dubbed it the, ‘I swear to _God,_ Barton,’ smile.

Clint strode into the room with casual indifference and dropped into the chair Coulson gestured to. He nodded at his amalgamated logo of sleep deprived madness, which hung off the front of Coulson’s desk, directly over the actual SHIELD logo.

“What is this?” Coulson pointed to it.

“It’s my hobby horse eagle,” Clint said with a deathly straight face.

“It’s your—what?” Coulson shook his head, and Clint felt momentarily pleased that he could still surprise Coulson with his level of absurdity. “No, you know what, I don’t even want to know.”

“Actually, it’s technically Nat’s hobby horse eagle. I just contributed to it,” Clint explained.

“Why do I find that hard to believe?”

“Because you know me?”

Coulson sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, before flashing a tired smile that Clint knew meant, ‘I’m not getting paid enough for this shit.’ When he looked up, he said, “Why is it in my office, Clint?”

“I just thought you could do with a little more color ‘round here. You know, spruce the place up a bit,” Clint bounced in his seat, grinning, “I mean, look around you. It’s like an Apple store puked all over Men In Black and got diagnosed with clinical depression.” He waved his arms around at all the gray and silver chrome, passing over the display case that housed Coulson’s vintage spy gear and Captain America merchandise. Coulson looked unimpressed.

“The real question is: _how_ is it in my office?” he said, ignoring Clint, “And why did it appear when it did?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Clint,” Coulson said again, firmer now, “Cut the clueless act. How did you know about my meeting with the director?”

Clint’s eyes grew comically wide, “Oh my god, did I get you in trouble for this? I am so sorry, I had no idea!”

Not a muscle of Coulson’s stern expression changed. Clint blinked innocently back at him.

“Let’s try this again. How did you get around the security measures on my office door?” Coulson asked.

“Sir, I’d need your ID card for that,” Clint said, “And even then the door would log my entrance, and I’d show up on the hallway cameras.”

Coulson said nothing, but continued staring him down.

“Um, are we done here?” Clint asked, rubbing the back of his neck, “It’s just, I promised Tasha we’d hit the gym together.”

“You may leave,” Coulson grudgingly allowed.

“Great! You’re the best, boss,” Clint snapped his fingers and pointed at Coulson as he backed out of the office. Coulson paid him no attention, choosing instead to rearrange a pile of papers on his desk. Just when Clint stepped out of sight around the door, he swung back into the room, as if suddenly remembering something. “Hey, one more thing. What’s the Tahiti Project?”

Coulson’s head snapped up, but Clint was already gone.

The hobby horse eagle still hung from his desk. 

* * *

 

“You are going to get caught,” Natasha told Clint.

“I know,” he said, “But it’s fun watching them run around like chickens with their heads cut off.”

“Do chickens really do that?”

“Yeah. It’s gross.” 

* * *

 

Clint had often known things he wasn’t supposed to. He knew before either Lance or Bobbi about their divorce. He knew that the person stealing pizza from the break room was not in fact him, but a stray dog roaming the building (at least, that’s what he claimed). He knew that Kate had a crush on one of her Academy partners, and that another had a Snapchat that consisted exclusively of him making frustrated faces with the two of them oblivious in the background. He knew that Cooper had created a secret fort in the hayloft despite the signs that read, ‘thar is no seecret fort in this ha loft.’

Some of this knowledge was obtained through simple observation, some through common sense, and still some via the Natasha Romanoff Gossip Source, but sometimes Clint couldn’t possibly know the things he knew without there being a security breach involved. Once, before Project PEGASUS was ever approved, he asked Coulson about the Tesseract. Another time, he asked the STRIKE team leader if he knew anything about bionic arms. Clint noticed several suspicious characters trailing him for a few weeks following that question, but he never connected the two.

Coulson was well aware of this tendency of Clint’s, and had no doubt that for every piece of information Clint let slip that he knew, there were ten more hiding away in his brain. He never showed any inclination to sell those secrets to anyone else who shouldn’t know them, which Coulson believed was the only thing keeping Fury from hauling him in for questioning. As it was, a small team of people had been tasked with studying Clint and discovering how he obtained his information whenever they ran out of higher priority missions, and since that never happened he got to keep his secrets.

Fury decided this had gone on for long enough. 

* * *

 

“Natasha, have you noticed the agent who’s been following me all day?” Clint asked while in line for lunch.

“Blond with glasses or short brunette?” Natasha replied, not taking her eyes off the salad she scooped onto her plate.

“Both,” Clint said. “They’ve been tailing me ever since Coulson called me into his office.”

“Well, did you say anything stupid there?”

“I might have,” Clint piled a mountain of croutons on top of his meager salad, “I mentioned something at the end that was maybe more classified than I thought.”

“You really need to stop doing that.” Natasha grabbed a spoonful of peas.

“Yeah, yeah. Chickens, remember?” Clint smothered his plate in dressing. “The thing is, I don’t even know what I said. I just heard a snippet from Fury’s meeting, and I used it. You hear that?” He raised his voice for the people following him, “I don’t know anything.”

Natasha just rolled her eyes and picked up her plate.

* * *

In the course of the next week, Clint’s joke SHIELD logo appeared and disappeared from six other places that Clint shouldn’t have had access too. No surveillance equipment could pick him up, and in the one room it showed up in with cameras inside, Clint timed it perfectly to avoid them.

Fury launched an all-out investigation into the matter. Security was tightened all over SHIELD. Extra cameras were installed everywhere. A twenty-four hour surveillance team was placed on Clint, which he easily slipped. Nobody seemed too know _why_ or _how,_ but Clint had, overnight, become SHIELD’s biggest threat to security.

Clint could only hope Fury was just trying to make a point.

* * *

“Seriously, Barton,” Bobbi asked once, “What the hell did you do?”

“I have no futzing clue.”

She raised one skeptical eyebrow.

“Honestly!” 

* * *

 

Clint shuffled along on his hand and knees, cursing the awkward, splayed position needed to crawl through these metal shafts. He moved slowly, meticulously, careful not to make any noise that could echo down the air vents and alert anyone to his presence. Wrapped up in its own wings and slid into Clint’s otherwise empty quiver was ‘That God-Awful Thing,’ as other agents had taken to calling it. Clint liked the name; it had character.

_Clink._ That God Awful Thing brushed against the ceiling of the air vent.

Clint froze, listening intently to the murmur of noise in the training room below him. When nothing changed, he allowed himself a sigh of relief and continued ever-so-slowly down the air vent. About three feet along to his right, light filtered through a big, square shutter, which he unscrewed and detached with an ease born from many years of practice. He poked his head through to check if the coast was clear, but the only people in the room below were Agent Murphy and a group of new recruits in the middle of a lesson on how to use the new stun guns.

Carefully, he shimmied out into the space above Training Room B, in the network of wide, metal support beams near the ceiling that doubled as a way for maintenance workers to reach the giant spotlights that illuminated the gym. In all his years of using this route to avoid passing the med wing on his way to the cafeteria, he had never seen anyone up here repairing the lights.

There was a first time for everything.

As he straightened up, making sure The God-Awful Thing didn’t bump against the edge of the vent, a man appeared from behind the nearest spotlight, holding a tablet with the SHIELD logo (the actual one) stamped on its back.

Clint stared at the man. The man stared back at him. The man shouted at the top of his lungs, “Agent Murphy!”

From the ground, the senior training officer spun around to squint up into the rafters and, with hardly a moment’s hesitation, snatched up the nearest stun gun and shot Clint between the eyes. In the tiny space of time between the dendrotoxin entering his system and it taking affect, Clint had time to think only one thing:

_Aw,_ futz.

* * *

 

The next thing Clint knew, he was handcuffed to an interrogation table, and Natasha was jabbing a hypodermic needle into his arm.

“Ow, Nat! What are you—” Clint tried to swipe her hand away, noting the expression on her face that unsuspecting victims might mistake for hostility instead of Natasha’s desperate attempt not to laugh, and then his eyes fell on the person at the other end of the interrogation table.

Director Fury sat in stony silence with his hands panted on the table in front of him. He looked supremely unimpressed by Clint’s antics. Clint gulped.

“What the hell, Barton?” Fury said.

“I swear I’m not a spy!” Clint blurted out. _Great job, me,_ he thought, _that’s exactly what a spy would say._

“Technically, you are,” Natasha pointed out. Clint shot her a wide-eyed look of pure panic, and Fury’s only reaction was to raise his left eyebrow.

“Well he _is._ He works for SHIELD,”Natasha defended herself, glancing between Clint and Fury.

“ _Not. Helping,”_ Clint hissed.

Fury’s eyebrow raised even higher.

“I’m not a spy!” Clint insisted.

“I didn’t think you were a spy,” Fury said. Clint slumped back in relief. “I just asked, ‘What the hell, Barton?’”

Clint blinked.

“How long have you been sneaking around the air ducts without anyone knowing?” Fury asked, more incredulous than accusatory.

“How did you find out about that?” Clint shouted.

Fury’s eyebrows shot down into a solid, irritable line. He didn’t need to say anything to get his point across.

“Right. Er…” Clint tried to rub the back of his neck, but couldn’t reach due to the handcuffs. “Hey, since I’m not actually a bad guy, can I take these off now?”

“No.”

“Oh. Um… Okay,” Clint mumbled, “A while.”

“What was that?” Fury had excellent hearing; Clint doubted he actually needed to hear it repeated.

“I’ve been using the vents to get around for a while now. A few years,” Clint said anyway, “But I’m not a spy. I want to stress that point. I am not a—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re not a spy. I get it,” Fury said, “And you expect me to believe you just _happened_ to overhear a whole shit-ton of top secret crap in the meantime?”

“Yes!” Clint insisted, “Honest to God, I just use the vents to—to do pranks and stuff. Not gather secret intel to report back to my terrorist overlords!”

Fury said nothing.

“I’m joking. That was a joke. I don’t actually work for terrorists,” Clint quickly clarified, “I really do just use it for pranks. And hiding from paperwork sometimes, but that’s not the point. The point is, I don’t _try_ to hear classified intel; I just _do_ sometimes, because of the way sound travels through the vents. I don’t even know what half this stuff I hear means. Like that, uh… that Tahiti thing: I don’t have a clue what that’s all about. I just like screwing with people, and I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut! Like now! I should probably shut up now, right? Yeah, I’m gonna shut up now.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Fury deadpanned, “‘Cause from where I’m standing, you just confessed to concealing a major security threat from your superiors.”

Clint gulped. “I don’t know if _major_ is the word I’d use _._ I mean, I can only pick up little snippets of stuff, not enough to be an _actual_ threat, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t by the way.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Right. Yeah, okay,” Clint rambled, “But really, it’s not as big a deal as you think.”

“It really isn’t,” Natasha added, “I’ve been in there with him. It’s almost impossible to get any good gossip out of it. The biggest threat is how it circumvents security cameras, but I haven't met anyone else who could get around in there without bumping into everything.”

“Oh, _now_ you decide to weigh in!” Clint said.

Natasha grinned, and Fury just rolled his eye.

“What, so I get a whole interrogation for crawling around the vents, and she gets an eyeroll?” Clint complained, trying to wave his hands around in emphasis, “That’s… That’s sexism, that’s what that is, letting her off the hook just ‘cause she’s a girl. Shame on you, Director.”

The scoff Natasha gave him was one for the history books, while Fury looked like he was reconsidering ever hiring Clint. He didn’t respond; he just reached under the table and drew out, pinched between two fingers to minimize contact, That disheveled God-Awful Thing.

“I can explain,” Clint said.

“Barton,” Fury said, as Clint opened his mouth to do just that, “Shut up if you know what’s good for you. I don’t want to hear what went through that thick head of yours when you made this. All I care is it goes in the trash.” With a look of utter disgust, he flicked it into the bin in the corner of the interrogation room.

“So… Am I in trouble?” Clint asked, his voice shooting up in pitch.

“What did I just say about shutting up?”

“See, but I _don’t_ know what’s good for me.”

“How are you not dead yet?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Natasha said.


End file.
